How to Add Reviews to Carrd: Inline or Hidden

Carrd asks a question at the moment you add an embed that no other builder in this series asks, and getting it wrong produces a page where everything looks fine and nothing appears. The Embed element has a placement type. Inline puts the code where the element sits on the page. Hidden inserts it into the head or the body without rendering anything you can see. For a review widget the answer is always Inline, and the reason people end up on Hidden is that it is a perfectly sensible option for the analytics snippet they pasted last week.

It Needs Pro Standard

Carrd documents the Embed element as requiring Pro Standard or higher, so this is one of the cases where the plan decides the answer before anything else does. On the free tier there is no embed element to configure and no workaround worth attempting.

That is worth knowing before you spend time building a widget. Carrd is inexpensive and a lot of its users are on the free tier deliberately, because a one-page site is exactly what the free tier is for, and the upgrade is a real decision rather than a formality.

If the plan is not going to change, the honest alternative is a prominent link to your review profile. It costs a click and it is truthful, which beats a page that promises reviews and shows an empty band where the embed was meant to be.

Inline or Hidden Is the Whole Decision

When you add an Embed element, Carrd asks for a type. Inline means the code runs in the position the element occupies, which is what a widget needs, because a widget is content. Hidden means the code is inserted somewhere structural instead: the head, immediately after the opening body tag, or before the closing one.

Hidden exists for the things that genuinely have no position, which is most of what people paste into a site: analytics, a pixel, a font loader, a verification tag. If the last thing you embedded was one of those, Hidden is a familiar choice and an easy one to repeat by reflex.

The symptom of getting it wrong is a page that publishes cleanly with no visible change. Nothing errors, because nothing is broken. The code is running exactly where you told it to run, which happens to be somewhere with nothing to render into.

The Builder Shows You Nothing

Carrd states that the embed will not output anything in the builder and that you need to publish the site to see it in action. This is documented behaviour rather than a fault, and it changes how you work: the builder is for placement and sizing, and the live site is where you check the result.

So publish earlier than feels comfortable. A Carrd site is one page and publishing takes seconds, and the alternative is arranging a layout around a blank rectangle and discovering the proportions were wrong after everything else is finished.

It also means the usual instinct to debug in the editor does not apply. If something is not appearing on the live page, the editor cannot tell you why, and the questions to ask are the plan, the placement type and the snippet itself, in that order.

One Page Is the Real Constraint

Carrd sites are one page, usually one or two screens, and every element competes with every other for a share of a very small surface. A review widget that would sit comfortably on a long marketing site takes over a Carrd site entirely.

The layouts that work here are the compact ones: a rating badge with the review count, or a single row of two or three cards. They say the same thing in a fifth of the height, and on a page this short the height is the currency.

A tall masonry grid or a long list is the wrong shape, not because it looks bad but because it changes what the page is about. If the reviews are the point of the site, that is a decision to make deliberately rather than one to arrive at by picking the layout you liked most in the builder.

How Do You Build the Widget?

Paste your Google, Trustpilot or Facebook profile URL, preview your real reviews and rating, then choose a compact layout from the badge or slider families, and set the colours and fonts to the Carrd palette.

Match the type especially carefully here. A Carrd site is usually a designed object rather than a document, often built by someone who chose Carrd because they wanted control over exactly one page, and a widget in a different typeface reads as an intrusion.

The header rating comes from the platform aggregate rather than from the cards being shown, so the number is the same one on the profile. Free plan, unlimited widget views, which matters when a link-in-bio page can get a lot of traffic very suddenly.

Where Should the Reviews Go?

Directly above the single call to action, whatever it is. A Carrd site normally ends in one button, one form or one email address, and the rating belongs in the moment before the visitor decides whether to use it.

Above the fold if the page is a link-in-bio or a personal landing page, because a lot of visitors never scroll on those. Below the offer if the page explains something first, because evidence before the claim has nothing to attach to.

One placement only. There is no second page to put a badge on, and two review elements on a single-screen site is the same content twice with nowhere to hide.